Customer lifetime value

Business Metrics #2 of N: Customer Retention Rate

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In this post, We’ll explore a Business metric called “Customer Retention Rate”

What is it?

It is a metric that helps an organization monitor the % of customers retained.

Let me give you an example:

YearNumber of CustomersRetention Rate
0100100%
18585%
27070%
36565%
46161%

Do you notice the third column that keeps a tab on the percentages of customer retained? This is the basic Idea behind customer retention rate.

How is it used?

This metric correlates with other key business performance measures like: customer service, product quality, customer loyalty. Think about it. If the customer retention rate is higher than the organization must be doing “something” right – that something could be: great loyalty program, great customer service or great product quality! If it’s low then it requires some action from decision makers – they would want to know the reasons so that they could fix the situation.

In earlier post, we talked about Customer Lifetime Value – now higher customer retention rate would also help us have a higher customer lifetime value.

Also it’s important to realize that the cost of acquiring a new customer is typically higher than keeping existing customer – and so organization that sells products/service like to measure the customer retention rate.

Also, if you customer data then you can drill down to find trends in the retention rate. Questions like: Which Age group has the highest retention rate? or which has lower? Retention rate for male customers? And also predicting customer retention rate of a new customer?

Conclusion:

In this post, we learned about a business metric “customer retention rate”.

And as a reminder, This series is meant to understand Business Metrics from Analytics Perspective.

Business Metrics #1 of N: Customer Lifetime Value

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This post will briefly describe an important marketing metric called “Customer Lifetime value”.

What is it?

It’s an important metric in the world of marketing. It helps businesses measure a customer’s worth to a business during the entire business relationship. In other words, it helps a business calculate net profit associated with a customers relationship starting from first purchase AND subsequent purchases along with expected future purchases.

How is it used?

It’s used to measure return on investment when formulating marketing strategies. Here’s an example: If your strategy costs $100 to acquire a customer and the average lifetime value of customer is $400 – then well, that’s a great thing, isn’t it?

It also helps business focus on making the most out of the existing customer relationships.

To extend these examples in the Internet marketing world, let’s take an example:

Suppose that the cost of acquiring a customer via Internet marketing is $25. The customer buys a $10 worth of goods. Is this good? Not from what we’ve seen so far. But the lifetime value of customer is $120 – see, now it does makes sense to spend $25 to acquire a customer.

Conclusion:

In this post, I wrote about a key Business Metric that should be of help when you work on your Marketing analytics project. Note that accurately measusring this metric is NOT an addition of couple of numbers and there is some thinking involved. To that end, I would leave you thinking about this critical business metrics that could be used in marketing analytics project! Your comments are very welcome!